The history of the universe — from the Big Bang to the end of the year — day by day

Puttin’ on the Ritz

170 kya. It’s fancy dress day on Logarithmic History. Between 170 and 80 thousand years ago, people started wearing clothes. We know this from recent genetic studies showing that sometime during that period, probably closer to 170 kya, pubic lice and body (=clothing) lice diverged into two separate species. This is before modern humans left Africa, so it probably means clothing was not just about protection from high latitude winters. (There’s an even earlier split, three million years ago, between head lice and pubic lice, that probably means human ancestors had lost their fur. And there’s another story about the ancestors of East Asians picking up a different strain of head lice from non-sapiens humans that we’ll cover later.)

Lice are not just disgusting, but dangerous. On later dates, we’ll have occasion to see how louse-borne diseases like typhus have affected the course of history. But for now let’s forget about lice, and celebrate clothing, with Irving Berlin’s song about fancy duds, “Puttin’ On the Ritz,” covered below by a Moscow flashmob. (Also relevant to the video is Barbara Ehrenreich’s book on dancing in history and prehistory Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy, although collective dancing isn’t something we can put a date on yet.)